Building Capacity through Professional Learning Communities to Advance Identity Integration in STEM Pre-Service Teacher Preparation

Harding University Main Campus

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national need of building the capacity to prepare STEM teachers to serve in high-need school districts. This project will accomplish this goal by developing education pathways that enable STEM majors to be trained and licensed to teach. High-quality STEM teachers can inspire the next generation of scientists to use scientific tools and methods to solve societal problems. Furthermore, training STEM teachers is crucial for meeting targets of national scientific advancement. Unfortunately, current approaches to training, recruiting, and retaining STEM Educators have yielded mixed results. An overlooked aspect of this problem is the conflicting identities between STEM and education programs. STEM teachers may feel conflicted between the cultures of these programs as they transition from preparation to practice. This capacity building project at Harding University includes partnerships with Searcy, Bald Knob, and Riverview Public School Districts. The project goals include leveraging the theoretical foundations of identity theory and professional learning communities to build a degree program that will nurture an integrated STEM teacher identity. These project goals will be accomplished by building a professional learning community of relevant stakeholders to guide the creation of a novel STEM degree plan that bridges the identity gap between teacher preparation and STEM disciplines. The professional learning community will assess stakeholder needs and identify available capacity and the capacity lacking at Harding University for completing the project goals. The project will employ quantitative and qualitative techniques to obtain and analyze data from 550 - 600 STEM teachers, high school seniors in STEM courses, STEM college faculty, and other relevant stakeholders. Further, the project will document the findings that inform partnering school districts about STEM Education and be evaluated by an external evaluator. This project is well-positioned to provide a model for assessing the potency of using a professional learning community to drive identity integration that strengthens the pathways between STEM disciplines and teacher preparation. The knowledge uncovered through this project can influence practices in teacher preparation and hopefully bring them into closer alignment with real-world changes in STEM. This capacity building project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the effectiveness and retention of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.